Saving gopher tortoises, small step at a time

Wednesday

Apr 29, 2009 at 12:01 AM

A new state policy that provides incentives for creating gopher tortoise habitats hit the ground crawling Tuesday.

By Megan RollandStaff Writer

A new state policy that provides incentives for creating gopher tortoise habitats hit the ground crawling Tuesday.Four gopher tortoises were released Tuesday into the Lochloosa Conservation Easement in southeast Alachua County."I have a vested interest in this population," said Joan Berish, a biologist who has studied the existing gopher tortoise population in the conservation area for the past 27 years. "I really couldn't be more excited about what is happening here today."Less than two years ago, the 15 gopher tortoises that have burrowed homes on a site in Alachua County slated for a landfill expansion would have been "entombed alive."But thanks to legislation passed in 2007 both dedicating the species as endangered and creating a special Gopher Tortoise Management Plan, the reptiles were rescued and relocated.The Lochloosa preserve is owned and managed by Plum Creek Timber Company, which paid for the land to be transformed into an ideal habitat for the relocated tortoises - a 570-acre habitat that is partially enclosed with silt, or fabric, fence to keep the little guys put."While to the human eye this may look scruffy," Berish said of the land ,which has been recently thinned and control burned. "To these guys, it's beautiful."Many released tortoises are able travel miles back to where they were initially captured, but the temporary fence will ensure they stay in the conservation area until they create a burrow.Waste Pro - which owns the landfill at 19815 Archer Road - paid a fee to not only have the tortoises carefully excavated from adjacent land but also to have the tortoises placed at their new home on the Plum Creek land.The price per tortoise is hard to track down, officials say, but estimates are somewhere between $500 and $1,200 a piece.

Greg Driskell, manager for Plum Creek, the largest land owner in the United States, said the financial incentive was a key piece in making the gopher tortoise conservation habitat a reality."We had to give up some revenue on this property," Driskell said of thinning the timber and scaling back logging operations. "The incentives were the biggest change that made this feasible for us."Plum Creek voluntarily created the habitat and is the first in the state to do so.The hope is that the state ordinance will enable tortoises to be kept on conservation land, and that protecting those tortoises will generate a small profit at the same time.The Plum Creek property is permitted to accommodate more than 1,700 tortoises in addition to the existing population of about 240.The 16,600 acres at Lochloosa were put in a permanent conservation easement in 1992 by Plum Creek, meaning it will never be developed.Robert Hutchinson, executive director of the Alachua Conservation Trust, also watched the tortoise release Tuesday and commented about what a huge shift in policy the event represented."It used to be if you wanted to save the tortoises, you did it in the dark of night," Hutchinson said.The largest threat to tortoises today is encroaching development, which causes tortoise habit to disappear. Gopher tortoises procreate slowly, only laying four or five eggs at a time.Berish called the baby tortoises "nature's ravioli" as the crew released a juvenile into the habitat.

But supporters are hopeful that the stricter state standards and incentives to create habitats will prevent the further decline of an animal that provides habitat burrows to hundreds of other species.